Curated by Pavlo Gudimov

Yanovych's Sum: “Interval"

“Interval" is a great exposition of Igor Yanovych's four most significant projects (“Dialogue" 2009, “Context" 2009, 2011, 2012, “Subjective Space" 2011, “Flow" 2013), created in collaboration with Pavlo Gudimov's Ya Gallery art center. It is also an important occasion to review them.

Master of the abstract, Yanovych never produces self-enclosed concepts, always taking the position of a perceptive listener and viewer, and from there growing his main themes – creation of new forms on the verge of creation and destruction; painting, close to music, not to literature; emergence of the third states of the substance on the comparison of the two. Like a short breathing pause – a pause against the background of the endless process of absorption and emission of the air by a living body – “Interval" starts where there is an open place. A short interval, unique in its randomness that gives an opportunity to observe “from the outside" the constant movement of the existence in its reincarnations, – and dangerous, because it disrupts the natural course.

Interval is a part of the movement and, at the same time, tearing out of its elements.

The way along the halls of the museum, detached from the history, is largely dictated by the peculiarities of the space and starts with the project “Dialogue". In its very name, softening the possible expectations of the “confrontation" of the figurative and the abstract, this series unites Yanovych's painting and sacral baroque wooden sculpture by Johann Georg Pinzel and unkown folk craftsmen. Involved into a shared conversation “two poles of spirituality" (as Olena Martyniuk calls them) – are not solely a plastic and figurative comparison, but a reflection of the author on the transience and destruction of the world, the trauma of time.

The material gained almost complete freedom in Yanovych's latest series “Flow". The artist influences the fluidity, dictated by the very essence of the world, mounted on canvas, as little as possible. The most effective forces are gravity and resistance. Somewhat arguing with Heraclitus on the “everything flows, everything changes", Yanovych creates “compositions that operate with randomness" in conjunction with the will of material, slowing the inexorable flow, keeping the value of the moment.

Yanovych dedicates his series “Subjective Space" to the eternal opposition of the interior and exterior space that is of great importance to abstract art. The line becomes a non-narrative guide here – “spontaneous and expressive, devoid of concrete content", it doesn't lead anywhere, but creates a special 3D construction – that surrounds the space around the line, the conscience around the subjectivity, that – on paper, or in the process of the viewer's observation – erase the barrier between the inside and the outside.

“Context" was born while viewing the photographs where the connection between artwork and the “unnecessary" wall provided a specific topic – launching of abstract painting in the unusual environment. Neither gallery, nor museum, but, as Yanovych himself puts it – social (even if there are no people there). Together with photographer Maria Bykova, he created a series of works, installed in the spaces of Lviv, Kyiv and Chornobyl, expecting that very third essence that will emerge from the juxtaposition of the painting and the surrounding, their contrast or dissolution in one another.

While producing its own thematic components, each series fit into a common, “flowing" into a broader reflection on the movement and the moment, the substance and the conscience, following the course and impossibility of direction. “Intervals" rather become a collection of questions than answers – questions that Yanovych asks not only the world or himself, but broadening the boundaries of abstractionism, putting it on the positions of the dialogue that is always perceived as completely impossible. The place, where a possibility is found to observe the flow “from the outside", this time is museum space (with its own intervals, unique gaps between the works, the flow of tracks, isolated contexts and the uniqueness of the subjective spaces), that to the contrary is forced to become a space for active movement, again relentless, again demanding intervals.

Borys Filonenko, 2014